An idea that we’ve promoted through the Library of Social Science Newsletter is the theory that the will to sacrifice lies at the essence of warfare. Societies produce death (and commemorate death)—in order to validate a sacred ideal.

Carolyn Marvin and Richard Koenigsberg have provided the fullest development of this theory. However, for an idea to become part of (social) reality, it requires support or confirmation by others who have written about this idea—and provided documentation.

Library of Social Science has searched far and wide to identify the best papers presenting the sacrificial theory of warfare. In this Newsletter—and those to follow—we will present them. Please click through the links below and read these papers. We hope you will develop this important idea.

Are we missing any writings that should be promoted through the LSS Newsletter? This is the best place to convey significant research. We reach 35,000 scholars, professionals and students. Our readers would love to hear about your own publications—or those of your colleagues—on this topic.

Please take your time reviewing the list of items below.
Then click through to read any document.

All participants in a sacrifice, including the victims, must regard the death for the sacrificial cause as purposeful; they must agree with the sacrificial ideology. If not, the latent function of the sacrifice is in danger of being revealed. Should that happen, the sacrificial ideology cannot prevail.

The formation of community is inextricably bound up with violence in the Hebrew scriptures. The first murderer becomes the first city-founder. The first unified action by the tribes of Israel—the first not in response to an external threat—results from the dismembering of a woman’s body.

The faithful man is one whose faith in an abstract, transcendent concept takes precedence over his earthly emotional ties to his child. The unwritten message is that to be faithful, fathers ought to be willing to sacrifice their sons if God, or a surrogate transcendent authority such as the state, demands. If Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, so much more so should ordinary fathers be willing.

The sacrificial metaphor at the heart of citizenship, and inextricably tied to war, has incredible power, all the more so because most citizens are unconscious of its active impact in our lives. Most citizens are blithely unaware of the contradiction between their assumptions regarding “the separation of church and state”—and the deeply religious sacrificial war-culture that so profoundly shapes their understandings of citizenship and the nation.

The Sovereign may bear a masculinized 'face' but the nation itself is feminized, a mother, a sweetheart, a lover. One can rightly speak, as Anderson does, of "political love, a love that retains the fraternal dimensions of medieval caritas,” but incorporates as well a maternalized loyalty symbolized domestically. The nation is home and home is mother. No more than one chooses one's parents does one choose one's country, and this adds even greater force to the nature of political love. We fall in love early through language, "encountered at mother’s knees and parted with only at the grave,” and through this language "pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed."

The willingness to die for one's country, be it a fatherland or motherland, seems to derive from a much older human 'habit' or 'reflex'— the universal need to secure one's well-being by appeasing the gods, or their human representatives. This appeasement began as a gift giving, or—at times of special duress—by giving up life itself, whether of oneself or of one's loved ones.